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Dallas Denny

On the Future of the TG Community

By Dallas Denny

For several years now, I have had a growing sense that the community's national organizations are on the verge of unprecedented change, of realignment. I'm not prescient; I certainly don't know just what the changes will be or what will cause them, but I expect they will be significant, and things will unfold fast once they start to happen.

No, I don't think an asteroid is going to smash into Boston or Atlanta and wipe out IFGE or AEGIS - but I do believe we are seeing changes in the way we transpeople define ourselves and in the ways we seek out information to help us deal with this voodoo that we do so well. There are also profound changes ongoing in the way the world reacts to us.

All these changes call into question the underlying philosophies and operating principles of many of the community's existing groups. This is destabilizing a number of organizations - including AEGIS. We may soon see an organizational shuffle, in which old names disappear and new organizations - hopefully more in tune with the times - emerge.

The Needs of the Community

What are the needs of the transgender community? Frankly, no one knows. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever taken the trouble to ask the community what it wants. Certainly many local groups and some of the nationals periodically seek feedback from their members, but to my knowledge, no one has polled the community-at-large.

Who knows what a national poll of the transgender community might tell us? Perhaps the community would say its biggest need is a source for inexpensive, realistic breast forms (MTF people) and a comfortable chest binder (FTM people). More likely, community members would say they want to feel free to walk down the street without fear; to have access to a support group and quality medical care (including hormones and surgery); security in their jobs; insurance coverage for trans-related medical expenses; freedom to love, marry, and raise children; and equal protection under the law. Perhaps they would also say they would expect any national organization with which they were affiliated to go to bat for them when their rights were violated. If this is so - and I suspect it is - it means that in addition to the publications, conferences, and referrals already available through existing groups, legal representation and advocacy services are needed. Although the existing organizations do their best to help those in crisis, none of the nationals, so far as I know, has developed an effective mechanism for providing these services.

I can confidently predict one thing a national survey would tell us - the community is tired of interorganizational squabbling and the posturing of the community's often self-appointed leaders (and please note, those of you who resemble that remark - I don't hold myself to be an exception). I frequently hear complaints about community infighting; a number of community leaders have told me they hear the same sort of thing from their constituents. I suspect a lot of community members are hanging back, staying in the background, withholding their financial and emotional support to organizations which sometimes seem to be giving more thought and attention to internecine politics than to the needs of their members. These folks are waiting for the national organizations to get their stuff together - then they'll ask themselves whether they want to dance.

Although transgender activists probably won't want to hear this, it's clear that only a minority of transpeople define themselves primarily as such. Perhaps being transsexual or transgendered comprises a part of their self-identities, but other identifications are as or more important. They are also parents, spouses, employers or employees, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, church members, members of political parties, club members, animal rights activists, musicians, and other things besides, and these identities claim most of their time, attention, and money. Any of these identities can be the driving passion of one's life, leaving little for the transgender movement. Those who have dedicated their lives to making the world safe for genderfolk are but a minority within a minority, and their vision for a gender-just society is not necessarily shared by the bulk of the community - well, maybe it is something we would all like to see, but most of us don't necessarily consider it important enough to spend money on it, especially now that we are: (A) finished with our transition and passing pretty well; (B) too involved with transition to be able to pay attention to or spend money on anything except survival; (C) too closeted to mail out a check; (D) much more interested in spending money on a Jim Bridges makeover (MTF) or a new tattoo (FTM) than on Tri-Ess or FTM International; or (E) having too good a time dressing up (MTFs) or weightlifting (FTMs) to be bothered by all this political stuff.

The Nationals: Working & Playing Well Together?

There have been some memorable attempts of the nationals to work together. The Congress of Transgender Organizations (which also included regional and local organizations) sputtered along for the better part of a decade before it ran out of gas. The Transgender Alliance for Community included most of the nationals, with member organizations staffing booths at professional conferences. The Alliance worked for several years, then it also ran out of steam.

Most recently, AEGIS, IFGE, and Renaissance agreed to form a committee to study the feasibility of cooperating and possibly even merging - but this, too, fell apart, and before the committee even met! Currently, the relationship among several of the nationals can best be described as mildly acrimonious, with leaders wavering between Going with the Dark Side of the Force and Listening to Obi-Wan Kenobi. There is, sadly, no initiative for interorganizational cooperation.

The Pros From Dover

If you've seen the Robert Altman film M*A*S*H, you may remember the scene in which surgeons Hawkeye and Trapper John are summoned to Tokyo to operate on the gutshot son of a senator. Knowing that almost any behavior will be tolerated because their skills are so badly needed, they show up at the hospital in golfing gear, waving drivers in the air and claiming to be the "Pros from Dover." They behave as outrageously as they know now, running roughshod over the nurses and the pip-pip proper major who is in charge of the surgical unit.

Our nationals sometimes have this Pros from Dover attitude. As an illustration, consider: several years ago, when the Transgender Alliance for Community went to its first professional conference - the National Association for Social Workers, held in Nashville, Tennessee - no one bothered to tell the excellent local organization, the Tennessee Vals, what was happening. Gender "experts" were being flown in from all across the country, but the ready and willing local volunteers were frozen out. I finally could take it no longer and phoned the Board Chair of the Vals, Marisa Richmond and told her what was happening. On short notice, and to her credit, she rallied the troops as best she could to support the nationals.1

While there are usually no flies on the folks who staff the national organizations, the truth is there are no flies on the locals, either. The level of expertise at the local level usually equals and sometimes surpasses that at the national. After all, none of us have graduate degrees in transgender activism (well, except maybe Riki Anne Wilchins), and few of us have been at this long enough to be as savvy as the professional activists who serve the gay and lesbian community.

Transgender national organizations must stop looking down their long noses at locals as if they were gender rubes from the hinterland. All of us have lifelong experience with our gender issues, and we are all qualified by virtue of our experience to do outreach work. In my book, we are all Pros From Dover.

Our Leaders

Good gender educators don't automatically percolate to the national level like cream; many talented persons choose to work at state or local levels. One of these days, perhaps, we will be able to hire trained professionals to run our organizations, but at this time we don't have the resources to pay them. Our national leaders are those who aspire, for whatever reason, to call the shots. Only a few are elected or hired. Unfortunately, in our roster of leaders we have not only talented and dedicated individuals, but a measure of posturers and self-promoters with whom an undiscerning transgender rank and file is usually unduly impressed.

There is no question that our leaders and the staff of the nationals work hard. Most put in long hours, and only a few receive pay. Most national leaders, myself included, hold full-time jobs outside the community so we can pay our bills and subsidize our activism. Most activists dig deep in their own pockets to make phone calls and pay for copies and stamps and travel expenses. This puts the community at risk, subject not only to the whims and tantrums of their largely self-appointed leaders, but just a couple of heart attacks, car wrecks, or burnouts away from shutdown - not that the community has any right to complain, for it is getting a free ride, reaping the many benefits of all this fine work without having to pay for it or do the work itself.

Clearly, it's time to move beyond organizations based on personalities and develop solid organizations which are independent of individuals, financially stable, and responsive to the community's needs. To do this, however, the community will have to ante up. It won't come free.

A Proposed Model

There is a great need for nationals and locals to work together more closely. Local organizations rarely do all the good work of which they are capable. They hold back, looking to the nationals to do the large-scale educational work. Certainly the nationals do their best, but their best is often inadequate, for there is simply no way they can handle the gender education and referral needs of this great nation with their limited budgets and staff. In regard to quantity of work, the locals do in the aggregate several orders of magnitude more outreach and good-will spreading than all the nationals combined - and they could do even more if they disabused themselves of the notion that the Pros from Dover are taking care of everything.

The community needs a way to equitably distribute work among organizations so that everyone is working at capacity and efforts are not duplicated. Local groups cannot look to underfunded and understaffed nationals to do all the work, and nationals must let go of their Pros from Dover attitudes and work cooperatively with local groups so that the workload is optimized.

Jessica Xavier has suggested that the future of our resource-poor community will lie not in a national organization that does everything for everybody, but in a dual-level structure with strong local chapters which receive support from a national arm which will exist solely to provide supportive services.2

That makes sense to me. The locals are an underused resource, for they have access to volunteers to help with labor-intensive tasks, and activists who can be on the spot in hours wherever they are needed. What we really need is a cohesive national strategy for dealing with the needs of the community and a mechanism for putting people on the spot wherever they are needed without having to bring in the dreaded - let's say it all together now - Pros from Dover.

Accountability

Too often, the internal workings of both our national and local organizations are shrouded in secrecy. Usually, indiscretions and sometimes even outright thefts do not make it into the press, and when they do, those who take the trouble to inform the community about what is happening risk being branded as whistle blowers. Let's face it - the best way to operate is to run a tight ship, with no improprieties or appearances of impropriety. The way to deal with problems is to fix them - not cover them up. Rationalizing improprieties by claiming it's "for the good of the community" is moral cowardice and insults the intelligence of the community. Organizations which try to snow their members are not really fooling anyone. The community's dirty little secrets are known to practically everyone, even if they rarely get talked about in print.3

While we may look to our national organizations to work for us, we have not given them carte blanche to do whatever they want. They are, after all, our organizations. Some are service organizations, and some are membership organizations, but whatever their form, they have an obligation to keep us, their constituents, informed about what is happening, not only externally, but in regard to internal operations, and especially in regard to financial information. Nonprofits are legally obligated to share their financial information with the general public.

Finances

If we are to have stable national organizations, they must be on sound financial footing. Yet none of the nationals are in good financial shape. Every one is hurting, each in its own way, and each responds in its typical fashion. One calls past contributors, whining for donations; another shames community members into giving; a third mails out periodic (and distressingly frequent) "crisis" letters; yet another reorganizes to face the realities of changing times. Others simply scale down their activities or shut their doors when monies don't roll in.

One thing is for sure: historically, funds for trans-related services have been difficult to obtain. City, state, and the federal government have refused funding, and gay and lesbian organizations have paid us little attention. My sense is that in this age of transinclusion, this is about to change - Seattle's Ingersoll Center, for instance, recently got two grants funded by The Pride Foundation, a gay/lesbian/bisexual organization. But until gay and lesbian money or other outside money is readily available, our organizations' funding will have to come out of our own pockets.

Some community members have done their part and more in supporting local and national organizations with money and/or sweat equity. Others have done little or nothing. Certainly, it's distressing to sit for days at a booth at a conference, representing one of the nationals, talking to everyone but raising only about $200 while the vendor across the way clears six or seven thousand dollars for "important" things like frilly maid costumes and makeovers. Of course, this may be the community's way of saying to the nationals "get your act together," but I rather think it's the community saying to the nationals that what they are doing isn't nearly as important as a good beard concealer or a false mustache. And here's a sad fact: if that's what the community wants, none of the present-day organizations will survive in the long term. Only if the community wants organized representation will today's organizations - or for that matter any organizations which may rise to replace them - survive.

Are the Nationals Needed?

Certainly, for all their faults, the national organizations have accomplished a tremendous amount, and in ways most members of the community will never realize. Without the work the nationals have done in the past decade or so we would all still be in that scary before-the-genderrevolution time when we were all pretty much automatically losing our reputations and our jobs if anyone "knew." There was, after all, no "transition in the workplace" ten years ago. Without the work of the nationals, we would not be out and proud, and there would not be as many of us, for most of us would still be in the closet. We would not be enjoying today's atmosphere of relative tolerance, with as many doors open to us, so many accepting employers, or as many tolerant churches. The nationals made this change possible by putting us all in touch with one another; now, having been introduced to our date, do we no longer need the matchmaker?

Will we be worse off if the nationals don't make it in the long term? You're darned tooting. In all likelihood, the social progress we have made in recent years will grind to a halt, and we will be in danger of returning to the gender Dark Ages. We would all be negatively impacted, from the most closeted crossdresser to post-process underground transsexuals. But will the nationals make it in the long run? Perhaps, but I don't think so, unless things change. Unless they change.

Ch-Ch-Changes

Will new organizations arise as old ones go the way of the dinosaurs? Probably - although if the nationals die ignoble deaths without passing on their resources to their successors, there will be much reinventing of wheels. Most likely, we'll end up with a new generation of poorly financed and haphazardly organized small "national" organizations that burn out their founders and their leaders and are financially supported by a few "angels" who also eventually burn out. Knowledge and resources must be passed on in an orderly fashion, so that new organizations can build from the old.

It's not, after all, as if the current generation of organizations is the first. Does anyone remember STAR, the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries; or the Queens Liberation Front, or Full Personality Expression, the Erickson Foundation, J2CP, Golden Gate Guys and Gals, the Cherrystones? They are our equivalents of the gay community's Daughters of Bilitis and Mattachine Society, which are also long gone or which have metamorphosed into something different.

And speaking of the gay and lesbian community, what better place is there from which to draw parallels? To date, the transgender community's process of self-awareness, self-help, and political action has been in parallel with and perhaps twenty years behind the gay and lesbian community. We can and should learn from those who have gone before - and we can and should understand that we can look at the present-day gay and lesbian communities and get an idea of where we can be in another decade or so, if we play our cards right.

Technology

As profound as the forthcoming changes in our community may be, they will in all likelihood be overshadowed by general societal changes caused by computer technology. Telecommunication is a potent force which is molding the larger society and having a large and as yet largely unappreciated effect on the transgender community. Even as state and local real-world organizations are floundering, Internet organizations are thriving. The World Wide Web is extremely genderactive, and some members of the community consider the web, and not the nationals, to be the source for future community building (thanks to Judy Osborne for that insight and others which appear throughout this article). Relying on the Web can be both good and bad - good, because the Internet provides easy access to middle-class, literate persons (and from anywhere on the planet with a phone line) - and bad, because so much of the information is inaccurate or misleading; because not everyone can afford computers and telephones; and because not everyone can read well enough to use them effectively. Even when "every home" has a computer - and probably only about 40% of American homes currently do - every house will not have a computer, any more than every American now owns an automobile. The same folks who are locked out of our present community - the poor and uneducated - will not have access to the cyber community. While the Internet can provide accessibility from anywhere on the planet, it will have its divisive issues, different from, perhaps, but equally severe to those that exist in transgender organizations today.

One effect the Internet is having on nationals is in regard to information dispersal. Recently I typed in the word "transsexual" on a search engine on the World Wide Web, and got over 4000 hits. Many of them were personal pages, and some of them contained inaccurate information, but there was a great deal of surprisingly good information, right at my fingertips. With such a wealth available in seconds, who in the future will be inclined to wait a couple of weeks for an information packet from a gender organization? And which organization will be able to afford packets sent by mail at a cost of a dollar or two apiece, when a Web site can disperse ten or a hundred or a thousand times as much information instantly and for free?

Perhaps in the future all information - or most of it, anyway - will be dispensed electronically. It's certainly the most inexpensive and labor-saving way to reach large amounts of people with small amounts of money. Both national and local transgender organizations must be prepared to take advantage of not only the Internet, but other new and emerging technologies.

Identity Politics

In the past, our organizations developed along lines of sexual orientation and gender identity. We have had organizations like Tri-Ess for heterosexual crossdressers, AEGIS for transsexuals, and the Imperial Court for gay people. In the nineties, these once-distinct identities have blurred, and foci which once seemed important are no longer relevant. There is no longer a need to separate ourselves from gay people - they are hardly a liability, in these gay-positive nineties, and many transpeople identify as queer. In this posttranssexual, postcrossdresser age, when crossdressers take hormones and live full time cross-gender lives and transsexual-identified people eschew genital surgery, the old distinction between crossdresser and transsexual hardly makes sense as a basis for structuring our organizations. I suspect the new generation of organizations will not form itself along these historic lines, but along new lines; one emerging distinction is between those who use computers for telecommunication, and those who don't. A second distinction which has emerged is that between MTF and FTMs. FTMs have made it clear that they consider existing organizations less than responsive to their needs, and have formed their own groups - American Boyz, FTM International, and FTMCEP being three.

Who knows the lines along which we will choose to classify and separate ourselves in the future?

Guilt and Shame

Our community has come a long way towards ridding itself of guilt and shame, but vestiges of these negative emotions linger. When confronted openly, they are manageable, but when they lead us into denial, then they can be incredibly harmful. We often use these emotions to chart our community's course. The most noticeable example of this is when groups focus on heterosexual crossdressing or transsexualism. These foci can be healthy, but often they are not. Transsexual groups sometimes impose expectations on their members: "If you're a real transsexual, you will..." Those who do not follow the party line are declared nontranssexual and turned away. Other groups frown on those who are surgery-bound, declaring them non compos mentis for wanting to "mutilate their bodies." And many heterosexual crossdressing groups, I've increasingly come to realize, are not so much about being a crossdresser or being heterosexual as about desperately clinging to male heterosexual privilege while trying to deal with deep issues of gender dysphoria and/or sexual orientation.

I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing

This fragmented community, this group of like-minded people splintered into factions and each loyal to their pet organizations - is in need of a coming together. How ironic that the name of one of our conferences is Coming Together, yet we are, at the close of the millennium, so far apart. We need to sing - as Pamela Geddes told me, after a late night singalong at Fantasia Fair - in harmony. It's so wonderful when we get the harmony just right, isn't it? For a few short notes, we sound good, singing together, bass, tenor, alto, soprano (well, perhaps we're short a few sopranos in this community). Each of us keeps his or her separate voice, yet we blend together, making something beautiful and unique. Let's work on this harmony thing, can't we?

A Call For Community

It's like to end with a call to the transgender community - to every individual, and to all of the organizations, local, national, and virtual - to put aside their personal agendas, their ideologies, their grudges, and ask them to work together to change and to consolidate, to form a leaner transgender community, one with a smaller number of organizations - organizations which are not dependent upon personalities, which are financially stable, which serve the entire community, and which meet the actual and not the imagined needs of the community.

That's a tall order, and frankly, it almost certainly ain't a 'gonna happen. Like the rest of humanity, we in the transgender community can be obstinate, and we're probably fated to have our share of shootouts at the OK Corral, world wars which absolutely no one wants, false starts, stars which go nova, and flaming burnouts. But let's strive to work cooperatively, and let's try, shall we, to hit our harmony notes now and again. Let's support each other financially and with kind words, as we all go our separate ways together, doing our very important work of changing the world.


Notes:

[1] Sadly, professionals may not value the "set a booth up at a conference" format as much as some factions of the trans community thinks they do. Nor do non-professionals give this activity a high ranking. See the accompanying article for results of our poll of AEGIS members.

[2] This is what the community thought it was getting with IFGE. When originally envisioned, IFGE was to have been an umbrella organization which tied the community together,. As recently pointed out by Judy Osborne, IFGE's directors made a deliberate decision in the early 1990s to move it in a different direction. This is not to criticize that decision, but there is no denying that IFGE's change of direction has had a major effect on the community, and on IFGE itself.

[3] No, this paragraph was not inspired by the recent controversy with IFGE and the Winslow Street Fund. The problem is of long standing, and applies to all of the organizations.


Dallas Denny
American Educational Gender Information Service, Inc. (AEGIS)
P.O. Box 33724
Decatur, GA 30033-0724
770-939-2128
aegis@gender.org
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